Extension Steve Bikostraat / Ruud Visser Architecten

Architect’s Statement: Voordorp is a neighbourhood in Utrecht. The area was designed in the 90’s by several architects. Responsible for the supervision was the architect Theo Bos. He won the Rietveld prize for architecture for his urban scheme. Characteristically for the scheme is the small-scaled structure with many corners, gardens, entrances and a lot of new extensions which fit quite well in the architecture of the area.

The house on Steve Bikostraat 23 is a corner house in a housing block. It follows a typical Dutch social housing floor plan with a through room. In this way sunlight will enter the living room for the entire day. However, a through room floor plan also has its disadvantages. One of them is that the ground floor living area is not clearly defined. The borders between the living room, eating room, passing routes and back entrance to the garden are blurred. And also the garden layout is not optimally structured. Knowing: a non-functional small piece of garden on the side facade, no privacy on the side with the neighbours and the garden on the back with the awkward form of a triangle. Therefor the house is looking tight and unorganized.

With the design of the new extension we primarily aimed to restructure and optimize spatial experience.

We created a new living room of normal measurements (4.5×4.5m). We ‘slided’ the living room into the existing floor plan with a slightly different angle. Positioning it in such a way that the living areas are defined more clearly: kitchen, dinner room, living room, entrance to the garden, sitting area in the garden. Additionally the different angle of the new living room highlights the diagonal line of the floor plan, giving the house a much wider and spatial impression. A big spatial effect, with only a small intervention.

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